Energy efficiency is one of the design goals across the spectrum of computing devices. Even though efforts have been devoted to reducing system power, energy-efficient performance still remains a first-order concern in enterprise datacenters.
Software managed dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) algorithms often control processor frequency and voltage based solely on processor utilization. For example, in both Windows® and Linux based operating systems, the DVFS algorithms simply raise or lower processor frequency and voltage based on a utilization threshold. These algorithms rarely achieve optimal system energy-efficiency and it provides no performance guarantees for software workloads running on the system.